December brings many wonderful challenges for the elementary music teacher. With the diversity of our students, doing holiday-based activities can be tricky. So let’s talk about some alternative activities to keep things fun and joyful in elementary music.
There is such magic in the idea of snow, so why not use it to your advantage? My students love when we have snowy adventures in music class! There are so many musical concepts that can be covered through musical play with your little ones. Here are some of my favorites:
- Go Sledding! Break out your hula hoops and have students go sledding around the room. Students can “sled” with another student or alone. It’s a great way to practice self/shared space as well as levels of space (high/middle/low). Don’t have hula hoops? Then have students rock from side to side as they pretend to sled down the hill. Need a sledding tune? I love using the A section from Peggy’s Tune (Experimental Song & Chants Book 1).
- Snowball Fun! Our students are forbidden from having real snowball fights on the playground, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have pretend ones in the music room! Snowball fights are a great way to practice pulsating flow with little ones! We pretend to have a spirited snowball fight at the bottom of the sledding hill using the B section of Peggy’s Tune.
- Bake Some Cookies! No matter the season, everyone loves to bake cookies! This is a fun way to explore beat and weight in a variety of ways. From adding ingredients, to stirring the batter, to rolling the cookies, students love to pretend they are making cookies while moving to the music!
- Explore snow! Practice moving like snowflakes in a snowstorm. We move in curvy pathways as we gently fall to the floor. Such a fun way to explore sustained, gentle movement. We use “I’m a Little Snowflake” from Jump Right In Kindergarten to set up the activity. I also use a triangle as a signal for students to fall to the floor. They must keep moving as long as their hear the sound of the triangle.
- Go ice skating! Break out your little paper plates and give each child two. Use Vince Guaraldi’s “Skating” song or any song in triple meter. Watch your students move around the room with body awareness as they work to keep those skates on!
- Polar Bear? Explore same & different and improvisation readiness with your students through “Polar Bear” (free tune in my TpT store). I use my brown bear and polar bear puppets to demonstrate the conversation between the two bears, then follow it up with same/different patterns between the bears. The puppets help demonstrate how to properly sing same/different tonal patterns. As students become more comfortable with the song, I pass the bears around for students to practice singing same/different patterns back to me. The puppets help displace the focus from the child to the prop and help them to be more comfortable improvising musically.
- Song Story! No matter what your students celebrate, the desire for a special toy is always alive. I love to share the story, The Marvelous Toy with my students in December. It’s a beautiful song about a special toy given to a little boy by his father. I love that the
Looking for some more Winter based music activities? My friend, Elizabeth, from Organized Chaos, has some fantastic Winter-based idea on her blog too!
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